Turning rules and legislation into interactive digital experiences

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so hi everyone and welcome to this session on turning rules and legislation into interactive digital experiences now did anybody notice that this um presentation and this talk just suddenly appeared in the schedule few people few people yes so this morning it was a to be announced and then um we managed to uh get this slot without much notice so we've got a few little um unusual Ringin um but I will talk all about that in a moment I'm not talk much you okay so a little bit about me my name is Philipa Martin I'm the rules

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Code Practice lead at Salsa digital um I've been working as a business analyst in the rules code space since January 2022 and in a weird way that makes me both a newbie and a pro because it's a space where there's not a lot of dedicated people working in that rules of codee space around the world um my background before rules of code was in content and I've got over 25 years experience doing um mostly online content and user Journey work now originally when we submitted this um Talk for druple South it was going to be

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Michael pronin who is the program director for GV cs's uh digital experience um program uh but obviously with the little short notice I did very very kindly have a volunteer slforce to be up here in Al y thanks um thanks philipper um so hey everyone if you don't know me um my name is alist arneal I'm around the go CMS uh space so I've been there for quite a while um the actual title is an assistant director of go CMS but it's otherwise the technical product owner role uh and of course with that we work

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in the Department of Finance I've been there for gez just over 8 years um have been on the customer side obviously work on the program side these days uh and of course prior to that I was at IP Australia did a bunch of fun things there as well don't talk to me about trademarks please we've done enough over that over time um talk to me about web things um and of course that's yeah that's my blank expression up there as well noting that we're a bit short on time to get this together today I should

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have at least got tried to get a silhouette shouldn't I okay so the agenda today we've got a short introduction to rules' code um then we're going to look at why rules is code for Australian government which is where I'm going to pass over to Al given he has been thrown in the deep end I'm only going to ask him to do that section and then I'll take back over to look at use cases um to show you the proof of concept demos for the gvim samp pits and then next steps and questions you can

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feel free to move about or come back whatever you want now okay introduction to rules of code right so at its most basic level rules of code is about turning legislation policies or rules into machine readable code from there we get a rules as code API from a rules engine um and that can be then used by different user experiences so it might be websites um Etc in terms of our technical stack that we're using so the rules engine that we're using in the process uh we start off with legislation so on the diagram

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that you seeing on screen if you start on your bottom right you'll see the legislation we code that into open fisa which is an open source rules engine that was developed by the French government in 2011 um to codify the Social Security Act over there um and then we're using GV CMS and Drupal uh we specifically we built a web form open Fisco module um to um so that they can talk to each other basically and from there as you can see you can go to different user experiences might be websites mobile apps voice devices at the ETC at the

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moment we're focusing on websites okay so the other thing about rules is code is you can have this one Central rules engine um and that can go to multiple interfaces and also um multiple systems so one rules engine many interfaces as an example you could have one rules engine and the rules could be being read by a government front-end website and also a corporate frontend website or a federal government website and also a state government website or local government so it enables this cross jurisdictional Hall

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of government approach can also be really handy if you're talking about having uh an internal system so you can have the Australian public servants actually using the same rules engine as what's being used by um the citizens and that obviously really helps with that ability to be giving them the same information now I'm going to start to speed up so we get to the gcms stuff um benefits of rules as code reduces ambiguity creates a nice clear consistent s um citizen experience I'm going to show you actually an example of

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that through one of our sand pits shortly more accessible it's much easier for citizens to be able to interact and find out what information is relevant to them or what rules are relevant to them it's also more transparent so it helps government to be more transparent in terms of what the rules actually are um in terms of benefits for government it's easier to manage so there is a little bit of work obviously as you can imagine some of these legislations and acts could be hundreds of pages long so

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obviously it's going to be quite time consuming to um analyze those and then turn them into code but once you do do that then you have the ability to particularly using open fisa to make changes and updates and set um new laws and new rules that will come into place on particular dates um it's also reusable I mentioned that already you can use multiple interfaces and you can also use rules as code to inform policy I'll talk a little bit about that in a moment about policy modeling okay it's also recognized

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globally so oecd 2020 2023 and 2024 the 2020 reference up there is a dedicated report really good read for anyone who's interested and then rules code was also mentioned in those 2023 and 2024 publications of global Trends in government Innovation uh very quick snapshot of what's happening around the world um see there the nice gcms logo down the bottom right for Australia and that's what we're here to talk about today also I mentioned before that it is quite time consuming and therefore costly to um initially codify the rules

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however there has been a cost benefit analysis done in 2023 by Tim Dua published in the mandar room which you can see the um print out there so again another resource you can look up after this presentation and he actually found that for every dollar invested you got $261 in benefit now I think with rules' code you know it's easy to come up and talk about what it is but it's that really seeing is believing so seeing it in action really helps you to understand what it actually is um so I've got two websites

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up here um I'm going to show you not policy engine but I'm going to show you benefit me. NZ which was actually the first project that we were involved in with um rules as Co rules as code Trailblazers um including Pier Andrews who many people may be aware of in Australian government of course so I'm now going to um exit this for a moment and just show you um benefit me in action and then I'll be handing over to Al okay so basically with this website it looks at different um the New Zealand Social Security Act it looks at

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different benefits so people come through and they can answer some questions about themselves so in this case I'm a a New Zealand citizen let's just say I'm 35 it's totally the truth I'm currently without work I do not have an injury I am single um if you put in that you had children here it um just uses conditional logic to show Extra questions let's say that this person earns $100 a week they're not currently on any benefits they're not receiving family ta tax and they're paying $100 a

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week in rent and in the postcode for New Zealand of 1010 we hit submit and then you're they're given what they told so that they've got a clear information there about what they've um what information they've put into the system and then it calculates their total eligibility of $361 per week after tax and it breaks that down further into that they're getting 353 from um job seeker and then the $8 from accommodation supplement so basically once you hit submit that front end then goes to the rules engine gives the

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inputs that the person has um used the web form to put into the system and then creates the outputs being yes you're eligible and this is how much you need to get so going back to our presentation uh policy engine is a really good one to look up for policy modeling but as I said I won't demonstrate that now so I now want to hand over to Al to talk about why rules is code for gov CMS I will hand over the clicker don't worry it's my first time reading the slides too um so um from ourside in G CMS um we and if you are

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not familiar with us um we have a panel that we've got out there for duple service providers to do work to help our customers in the government government space uh and of course what we did as part of that panel we've done a refresh in more recent times um but we've also looked to expand obviously the scope of what's in that space so when we talk about our first bullet point here of late 2022 we very much wanted to move into that dxp space we had a lot of inquiries we had a lot of interest from

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people to touch into these spaces and have something available within or on or near our platform whoops go oh that's the only bullet point that's we oh no yours is the next one too this you're you're up next so in any sense just as a bit of a side note sorry we kill some time up here um we do a whole lot of technical documentation uh on a Thursday within G CMS and a big talking point we have about is use of bullet points full stops and things like that and I've now learn we've got one

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bullet point on this slide yes one sorry I'm we're a bit pedantic in those meetings if you can't tell nonetheless uh so of course within that space um well D dxp and rack rules as code is one of those things and of course when we think about personalization and the sort of material we can ask in here well we can get quite personal if we wanted to so steps in the gov CMS Journey oh numbered list this time let's see how many we've got here um we stop there exactly see this this is the fun we have Thursdays are always

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fun for us um so of course when we talk about steps in the Gs Journey um well Co vaccination rules funnily enough that's been a pretty hot topic over the last few years so that was a pretty good starting point probably actually missing a couple else off the front here but nonetheless uh and of course we've moved into a sandpit program as well so within that space we've been provisioning sandpits for customers within our space or those is working very close with NR space to actually try and build

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something that might work for them in a sort of rack setup and of course Future Point going down that road map we obviously want to get that to productionize point so we obviously want that to be available for people not only to test or validate or share to the boss or communicate that these things can be done we also want that as a point where that can actually be a product and can be delivered and available online so that's pretty much that at a high level we've also done a couple of small ones internally where I

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was the uh internal customer to measure against things we'd already done previously so quite a few other little things that we've done in that Journey there as well okay cool so from that sandpit perspective um like I'd already sort of touch to it's very much a Pock for those government departments um or teams within certain agencies if you've worked in government you know there's a lot of things going on underneath the hood there's a mix of things sometimes teams aren't even talking to each other that's

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a pretty good classic one there too um but of course for us uh it's important for us to be able to actually have a space where people can play with this figure out whether it's going to work for them whether it doesn't maybe it's a bit of trial and error and for a lot of them it's maybe the first time trying to do something like this uh and of course in this space for the most part it's a Soler driven aspect here is taking them through that end to end process so Michael who Philip mentioned earlier and his team does a

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lot of that initial engagement but does a lot of work with salserin and salsa pushes them through this process gets them an idea of well what's the problem statement what are the issues what are we actually going to try and model here and then trying to get that to an end point of hey here is something either fully or in most instances partially something that you can actually try and put your hands on and of course within that space there's things like rules mapping so of course understanding what is that

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legislation what is that process what is that rule that's a fun one personal experience uh and of course that that obvious coding part within open fisar which of course is a fun thing for Soler and the team to do like down on that one um and of course that other component which when Philip showed that example earlier um and the current approach is very much using a duple web form to actually do that initial build so of course a lot of that's still sitting within that druple environment getting it configured doing the sort of

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conditional Logic the pretty bits that go with that and then of course that obviously goes through open Fisker on the other side and of course obviously some really important ones here especially when we think about legislation and potential challenges for what legislation could be against obviously having test use cases in there so being actually able to validate that the rules go in the right way that they align to expected policy or maybe what it says in the legislation or in a lot of instances business rules validate test test test maybe a

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bit more testing something yeah um so very important things there and of course a big one which I'm super Keen about and I hope other people are who have sort of touched to this journey so far is an upscaling in this space I'm not familiar with the technology myself I'm very curious about where it goes and what it can do and of course I get the impression those who have at least been in this space looking to certain people in the career um that they also want some of that information too so they can be

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informed about how those challenges and changes and all the sort of fun stuff around that can happen and of course at this point we're nearly at a dozen pox we' got a few more underway uh a couple of those that maybe aren't there are some of that initial testing we did too so so we've had a bit of fun in this space still trying to get through some of those through as well you're done hey congratulations to me watch as I sit down and everyone wants to ask me questions at the thanks for doing that Al okay so now on to use

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cases so what is rules of code actually used for um or when is it a good fit eligibility is a really important one it probably I'd say about 80% of our cases that we've worked on have been eligibility based so it could be something like um am I eligible for well actually I'm going to show you an example later on which is am I eligible for a divorce or it might be am I eligible for a Visa or a passport or for a particular Cadet ship program Etc eligibility with calculations so this comes back to the original open

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fisa use case of the um French Social Security Act and cefine those Social Security benefits so open Fisker is really made for calculations it's where excels um compliance as well so there's a lot of examples but even looking at say a local Council level you could have someone who's putting in a building permit and they could be taken through a series of questions to find out if their building plans are going to be um compliant or not with the local guidelines or with a regulatory body uh classification is another one um we've

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got one use case with this at the moment which is um one that we're working on at the moment which is a really interesting one but this can be used across Ross things like um uh security classifications medical device classifications and a whole heap of other classifications you might notice that I've been a little bit vague sometimes um when I've been talking about the use cases obviously being government departments for some we have got permission to use their names and their specific use cases and I will be

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showing you some of those but for some of them we aren't able to um be as specific in terms of naming the agency or the you know really detailed use case generally rules of code works best for black and white yes no kind of scenarios having said that we have found a way around this where we kind of might have a page that says yes you're eligible we'll have a page that says no you're not eligible and then we also have a page which says you may be eligible so this is really helpful in those many

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situation when there's a bit of subjectivity required so perhaps they meet n out of 10 criteria but there's one criteria where it is actually going to need to be assessed by a human person rather than by rules engine probably the best use case where we want to get to is to create digital policy twins so if you think about the digital twin where you think about cities and and digital twins of cities and you use those to model infrastructure or public transport Etc in this case we can be using a digital

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policy twin to model legislation and most importantly you can model changes so for example if we wanted to um if we had codified the age pension we could model what would happen if we changed the age pension age from 66 to 65 how many more people would be eligible for the age pension how much more money would the government need to pay out in age pension payments how what would the impact be on our um aging Society what would the impact be on the poverty line and all these sorts of things could be modeled and discovered through um having

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a digital twin okay let's get on to a fun part so looking at some of our gov CMS rules as code s pit demos um so first of all we did manage to use pretty much all of those um test cases that I mentioned before so eligibility compliance click click click classification and also improving the user journey and the examples that I'm going to show um they're examples that also have resulted in an improved user journey and this is why the title of this presentation was talking about taking rules in legis ations and turning

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them into interactive digital experiences um and of course we have had one as well where we created um a fairly complete policy twin that's one that I can't talk about so sorry okay so let's have a look at um also we as I'll mentioned we're up to 11 proof of Concepts we've got another two underway at the moment and another couple coming through the pipeline too uh so oops o okay okay it really suddenly caught up then come on H well that looks pretty well I think this means that it's

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now time for me to give the demo what do you think let's get out of this and do the demo we'll see what happens okay so the first one I'm going to look at is from the federal circuit and Family Court of Australia there may or may not be some people who worked on this proof of concept in this room over there maybe um thank you very much for letting us demo this all right so obviously um there are some eligibility requirements when someone's applying for a divorce so at the moment a user would go to their

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website which yes you can see on your screen here and they would have a look through the information you can see there's some before you start there's are you eligible so let's focus on that for the moment and they'd need to read through this information to find out if they're eligible and then there's also um additional information about getting legal advice or other things you may need to consider Etc um so when this proof of concept came in for us um the finished product I'll show you

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now um so basically the person is presented with some questions so let's go through and answer those so let's say I was born in Australia I am not currently legally married oh sorry I am currently legally married this was actually not in the legislation but it was added in just as one to help with the user experience just to you make sure that the person is actually still currently legally married and the same with this one as well just to make sure that um the spouse hadn't already applied for a divorce so we

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check this one to my knowledge there is no nullification or divorce application lodged and then it's asked um which of the following applies to you and your spouse let's say say that they're separated but living under the same roof and they've been separated for 13 months and they will not resume their marriage or relationship and they have been married for um 2 years or more but let's say they were not married in Australia and they have a marriage certificate but it's not in English and

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then we hit submit so this then as mentioned before goes to open fisa puts those inputs into open fisa checks all against the rules that have been coded in open fisa and gives the output so here it says congratulations you're eligible to apply for a divorce in Australia but it's also got the extra information that was in some of those other um accordians that you saw before so it's worked out that you need um proof of marriage documentation and you also need documentation because you're separated but living under the same roof

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so it gives you all of that information I'm going to show you another use case that we also have have permission to demonstrate which is great uh and this is from the um uh the scheme so it's where's the full name I always forget it's a long name I thank you oh no no no there's there's another scheme what's it called the full name of the scheme is okay I I'll tell you later um so yeah this one this one we had to um look at different rules that were um requ required for people in terms of whether

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a particular building scheme applied to them or not so at the moment as you can see there's a website people have to sort of go through to try and find out well what's the what is accreditation um there's different um submenu items here about the appeals and what the process is and what the criteria is ETC but it's actually relatively hard to find out do I actually need to um be accredited under this scheme so it was a perfect um use case for rules is code so we now have our website so does the scheme apply so

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let's say the work is being carried out in Australia we also do these quick exits so if they said well the work's not actually happening in Australia they' get this scheme does not apply so say it is happening in Australia the building work is not for for residential single dwelling the project um is for more more than $4 million the building work is not part of a a joint venture they are the head contractor it is being directly funded by actually let's go indirectly funded by Australian government and the Australian government

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is paying $6 million to $10 million and it does represent 50% or more and we hit submit come on wake up sorry I'm not sure why this one is not going going through am I just being impatient am I one of my curses all right so scheme does not apply based on the information you provided the Australian government work health and safety accreditation scheme told you I tell you the full name of the scheme does not apply you do not need to get accredited under the scheme we've also created this ability in these to

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show me the rules to help with that transparency so people can instead of trying to interact with complicated legislation they can actually see more simple plain English rule statements um and so it's really clearer to them as well what the rules actually are now I'm going to try and go back to my presentation interesting which is here let's have it Go fingers crossed action all right so that gives you some ideas of what GV CMS um has been doing in the rules Co rules code space and hopefully also a bit of an idea about

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what rules code is and how it can be improved sorry how it can improve citizen experiences you may have also entered the competition at our booth has anyone entered that competition yeah yep it's going to be drawn later on for a potentially new name for rules' code so what are the next steps so next steps in terms of what's next for rules code in GV CMS um productionize on the gvms platform as we said this is a stage roll out started with the original Co Pock then the rules is code s pits and now we're in the

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productionize uh part of that productionize SZ product called assembl um and that allows open fisa developers to host and deploy code out of the box using assembl and if you want to find out more information about that that's at assembly.com and now we're on to questions any questions so you guys have to engage professional so we work closely with subject matter experts so obviously with the ones that were proof of Concepts it's not as important but we've still been working very closely with our

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subject matter experts within each department so generally um depending on the department some departments want to um get involved as a part of the upskilling um and so we'll work with them on the rule statements and then the eligibility logic and sometimes we have departments that might might not want to get quite as involved and just want to come in and sign off the rule statements or not sign them off they have obviously have to review them and make the tweaks and changes the other interesting thing that's happened while we've been doing

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this process is we've actually found a few um problems in the legislation and this is where if you create legislation and a policy twin at the same time you can actually identify these problems sooner and even when we've had subject matter experts in the room it's we've been kind of said well this means that they're not eligible by the legislation and it's kind of yeah it really points out some issues but yeah subject matter experts are very important any other questions yes so before rules

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go and I case where I test everything and I go back and this is wrong and so I did my own culations provided it to them and they did their culations got one value in theirs yeah I mean obviously when you're you have to get the the rules correct so that's where the subject matter experts come in and hopefully with the calculations as well the subject matter experts will be able to help with that as well but we also um it's test driven development so we use test cases um well not me personally I don't do the coding

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but our open FIS developers use test cases when they're coding and we always have the answers to those test cases and that helps to um make sure the actual calculations are correct as well any other questions I'll make one comment before we finish up um and that is to say that um a lot of people sort of say is this the same as AI or or is this related to Ai and so I just wanted to mention that this is not Ai and people say but you can just ask AI questions about legislation or if I'm eligible for

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something but obviously there are problems certainly at the moment with hallucinations for AI and so a lot of people talk about rules as code being the guard rails for AI so that you've got the actual rules that the AI can interrogate um in coded rather than them having to go through the actual policy the original policy and try to interpret that subjectively they have the coded rules oh one more question so is there a schedule for for you doing that then as part of this project um for the productionize do you

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mean uh well no it's more that it can be it's really up to um the government Department who responsible for each piece of legislation to decide that they want to codify it and then that creates the guard rail for AI um using the open fisa coded version so they would be individually responsible well yeah I mean they could build so there's lots of different ways that AI could be used within rules as code so one of them could be uh interacting where you have a chatbot that interfaces with open Fisco instead

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of it trying to read the legislation that reads the open Fisco rules but yes it's up to each department to decide they want to codify and that's where a program like CS helps because it can um really lead to that whole of government approach where you've actually got cross jurisdiction hopefully working as well um and obviously as some of you know if you're in government there can be one single um piece of legislation but there's actually three different departments that enforce different parts

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of that legislation and that's where you do need this whole of government approach so you're codifying the whole legislation okay um have we got time for one more question one more one more question I'm being told I was a comment actually tocy responsility okay I'd like to thank again El for stepping in on such short notice and thanks everyone for coming